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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
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http://www.archive.org/details/comfortsofhomeOOberg 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 



OTHER ATLANTIC BOOKS 

Atlantic Classics, First Series $1.25 

Atlantic Classics, Second Series $1.25 

Headquarters Nights. 

By Vernon Kellogg $1.00 

The War and the Spirit of Youth. 
By Maurice Bar res and Others $1.00 

Shock at the Front. 

By William Townsend Porter $1.25 

Pan-Germany: The Disease and Cure 
and a Plan for the Allies. 
By Andre Cheradame $ .35 

Essays and Essay Writing. 

Edited by William M. Tanner $1.00 

Atlantic Narratives. 

Edited by Charles Swain Thomas $1.00 

The Profession of Journalism. 

Edited by Willard G. Bleyer $1.00 

The Assault on Humanism. 

By Paul Shorey $ .60 

The Amenities of Book-Collecting. 
By A. E. Newton (in preparation) 

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 

BOSTON 



Th, 



COMFORTS of HOME 



BY 
RALPH BERGENGREN 




The Atlantic Monthly Press 
Boston 



.^ 






Copyright, 1918, by 
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. 



All Rights Reserved 



JUN 24 |9I8 

/ 

v 

©CLA499434 



Thoughts While Getting Settled 


I 


Praise of Open Fires 




16 


Furnace and I . 




29 


No Stairs — No Attic . 




4i 


Concerning Kitchens 




56 


The Plumber Appreciated 




68 


The Home of the Porcelain 


Tub 


81 


At Home in the Guest Cha 


mber 


95 



THOUGHTS WHILE GETTING 
SETTLED 

PROPERLY speaking, the new 
house was old. A hundred years 
and more had gone over its chimney, — 
down which, as we were to discover 
later, a hundred flies and more would 
come when the open fires had warmed 
it, — and within doors it would have 
charmed any amateur of the Colonial 
by the antiquity of its furnishings. 
Temporarily it belonged to me, my 
executors, administrators, and assigns. 
But there were limits to our possession. 
None of us might ' permit any hole to be 
drilled or made in the stone or brick- 
work of said building'; no 'sign or pla- 
card' might we place upon it; we might 
not 'over-load, damage, or deface' it; 
nor might we 'carry on any unlawful, 
I 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

improper, noisy, or offensive trade' in it. 
We had admitted that the glass was 
whole and in good order, and bound 
ourselves to keep it good, unless broken 
by fire, with glass of the same kind and 
quality. In case I became bankrupt I 
had agreed that the owner, the owner's 
executors, the owner's administrators, 
and the owner's assigns should treat me 
with every form of ignominy that the 
law has yet invented to make bank- 
ruptcy more distressing. Nor could I 
hold them responsible if our guests fell 
down the cellar stairs ; although there I 
think they would be morally respon- 
sible, for a steeper flight of cellar stairs 
I simply cannot imagine. 

Of all documents there is hardly an- 
other so common as a lease, or more 
suspicious. Observe the lessor — a 
benevolent, dignified, but cautious per- 
son! Observe the lessee — a worm 
2 



GETTING SETTLED 

with criminal tendencies! Perhaps he 
is a decent sort of worm, but the lessor 
had better look out for him. Very 
likely he will commit murders in the 
dining-room, read the Contes Drola- 
tiques in the library, play bass-drum 
solos in the parlor, and start a piggery 
in the cellar. One suspects that possi- 
bly the great army of hoboes is partly 
recruited from among supersensitive 
men who read their leases before sign- 
ing them and preferred vagabondage to 
insult. But some of us control our sen- 
sitiveness. I, for example, read my 
lease; and when, having agreed men- 
tally to post no placard myself, I dis- 
covered a clause allowing the lessor to 
decorate my residence with the informa- 
tion that it was 

FOR SALE 
I crossed that clause out! 
Observe the worm turning! 

3 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

It was the dining-room that had won 
us, formerly the kitchen and still com- 
plete — with the brick oven ; the crane ; 
the fat, three-legged pots and spider; a 
thing that, after much debate, we think 
must have been a bread-toaster; and a 
kind of overgrown curry-comb with 
which, so we imagine, the original dwell- 
ers were wont to rake the hot ashes 
from the brick oven. Also a warming- 
pan. And although these objects 
charm me, and I delight to live with 
them, I cannot but wonder whether a 
hundred years from now there may not 
be persons to furnish their dining-rooms 
with j ust such a stove as stands at pres- 
ent in my real kitchen; and perhaps to 
suspend beside it one of those quaint 
contraptions with which the jolly old 
chaps in the early twentieth century 
used to kill flies. I hear in imagination 
the host of that period explaining the 

4 



GETTING SETTLED 

implement to his wondering guests, — 
being expert in such matters, he will 
produce the technical term 'swat' with 
an air of easy familiarity, — and see 
him hanging it reverently up again 
beside the dear old stove and right 
over the picturesque old coal-hod. Per- 
haps, too, he will point out the beauti- 
ful, sturdy lines of the coal-hod. 

Now in due time, or, to be exact, 
some hours later, strong men came to 
this house with a motor truck; and, 
working with concentrated fury, they 
put into it all our own furniture, our 
trunks, our books, our clothes, and every- 
thing that was ours. It had been our 
purpose to direct these men: to say, 
'This goes here, kind sirs,' and, 'That 
goes there, gentlemen ' ; or, ' Believe me, 
this is the place for that,' or, 'Thank 
you, sir, but that is the place for this. 1 
When they had come and gone, and the 

5 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

empty truck had rumbled away in the 
early autumn twilight, everything was 
to be just where we had planned in 
advance; 'getting settled' would be a 
light but satisfying pleasure; organiza- 
tion, 'efficiency in business,' for we had 
been reading an article in a magazine, 
would have made changing our home as 
easy as changing our clothes. But 
these men were beyond mortal control. 
They came late and their mood was to 
depart early. Movers always come 
late, for two reasons: first, because they 
like to feel that you are glad to see 
them, and, second, because they do not 
like to place each object just where it 
belongs. They prefer concentrated 
fury. Children of nature, they inherit 
their mother's abhorrence of a vacuum ; 
unable, as they saw at a glance, to stuff 
the whole house from floors to ceilings, 
they devoted their attention, brushing 
6 



GETTING SETTLED 

us aside like annoying insects that they 
lacked time for killing, to stuffing such 
rooms as they instantly decided could 
be stuffed the tightest. If there was 
anything that we might presumably 
need at once, they put it at the bottom 
and buried it under the heaviest avail- 
able furniture. It was wonderful to see 
them. In the end they actually took 
money for what they had done and 
went away hastily. Organization and 
'efficiency in business' had accom- 
plished something: the trunks were up- 
stairs, and two barrels had reached their 
predestined place in the cellar. 

There appears in many business of- 
fices, although it is not, so far as I know, 
the official slogan of ' efficiency in busi- 
ness,' a card with the motto, 'Do It 
Now.' I looked into that room which 
was destined to be the library : formerly 
it had been a bedroom, and the four- 

7 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

poster bed and noble mahogany bureau 
were to have vanished upstairs before 
my arrival. But now, peering past and 
above and under the debris that the 
avalanche had left there, I recognized 
the noble mahogany bureau in the far 
corner, mourning presumably for its de- 
parted companion, the four-poster. I 
beheld it with a misgiving which I tried 
to put from me, but which came back 
from moment to moment and whispered 
in whichever ear was nearer. 

'Just suppose,' whispered Misgiving, 
'that the man who was hired to take 
that bureau upstairs found that it 
would n't go up! ! ! !' 

And I thought of that stairway, that 
went up furtively from the dining-room 
which had once been the kitchen, a 
delightful stairway (especially when one 
realized what a discouraging time a bur- 
glar would have in finding it, and how 
8 



GETTING SETTLED 

he would probably find the cellar stairs 
instead and die of a broken neck at 
the bottom), but narrow, narrow; and 
with a right angle just where a right 
angle was least desirable. It had been 
as much as they could do to get up 
the trunks. 

'You will very likely have to leave 
the bureau in the library,' whispered 
Misgiving, 'and that will be inconven- 
ient — won't it? — when you have 
company. Company will have to dress 
in the library or else gather up its 
clothes and run.' — 'Library!' said 
Misgiving. 'Who ever heard of a bu- 
reau in a library? People will think 
the library table is a folding bed. You 
can't disguise a noble old bureau like 
that by putting books on it,' said Mis- 
giving. 'Once a bureau always a bu- 
reau. — What will your wife say,' asked 
Misgiving, 'when she learns that the 

9 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

spare-room bureau has to stay down- 
stairs in the library?' 

People who, having something to do, 
'do it now/ live in the present. I 
seized the nearest object, a chair, and 
dragged it into the next room; I seized 
the next object, a box, and carried it to 
the cellar; I risked my life on the cellar 
stairs; I became concentrated fury my- 
self. In getting settled, whether you 
are a pioneer or a householder, the first 
thing is to make a clearing. No matter 
where things go, provided only that 
they go somewhere else. No matter 
what happened, no matter if bureaus re- 
mained forever in libraries, no matter if 
the awful puzzle that the strong men of 
the moving van had left me remained 
forever insoluble — this was my home 
and I had to live in it for the term of 
one year. I took off my coat, hung it 
up somewhere — and found it again 
10 



GETTING SETTLED 

two days afterward. I attacked boxes, 
chairs, tables, boxes, books, bric-a-brac, 
more boxes, chairs, tables. I ran here 
and there, carrying things. I excelled 
the bee. I made a clearing, which grew 
larger and larger. I gained self-confi- 
dence. Elsewhere I knew that other 
hands were unpacking trunks; that an- 
other mind was directing those mys- 
teries which out of chaos would evolve 
dinner; now and then, in my death-de- 
fying feat of going down cellar, I caught 
a glimpse of the furnace, — fat-bellied 
monster whom I must later feed like a 
coal-eating baby. 

It is a question — parenthetically — 
whether it is truly sportsmanlike to live 
in a quaint old colonial cottage with a 
furnace and electric lights. I have 
heard amateurs of the Colonial declare 
that they would willingly die before 
they would live in an electrically lighted 
ii 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

colonial cottage. The anachronism 
horrifies them: they would have death 
or candles. Probably they feel the 
same way about a furnace and a bath- 
room. Yet I have no doubt that the 
builders of this colonial cottage would 
have opened their hearts to all these in- 
ventions; and I am not sure that they 
would have regarded as anything but 
funny the idea that their own kitchen 
paraphernalia would some day be used 
to decorate my dining-room. I go fur- 
ther. Granting that electric lights, a 
furnace, and a bathroom are anachro- 
nisms in this quaint old colonial cottage 
— what am I but an anachronism my- 
self? We must stand together, the fur- 
nace, the electric metre, the porcelain 
bathtub, and I, and keep each other in 
countenance. 

'H-m-m-m-m!' whispered Misgiving. 
'How about a bureau in the library? 

12 



GETTING SETTLED 

That isn't an anachronism; it's an ab- 
surdity.' 

Making a clearing is a long step for- 
ward in getting settled; after that it is 
a matter of days, a slow dawn of order- 
liness. In a quaint old colonial cottage 
are many closets, few if any of them 
located according to modern notions of 
convenience. The clothes closet that 
ought to be in the spare room upstairs 
is downstairs in the library with the 
spare-room bureau ; the upstairs closets 
are under the eaves of the sloping roof 
— the way to utilize them to the best 
advantage is to enter on your hands and 
knees, carrying an electric torch be- 
tween your teeth. Inside the closet you 
turn on your back, illuminate the pen- 
dant garments with your torch, drag 
whatever you select down from the 
hook, grasp it firmly with your teeth, 
and so out again on your hands and 
13 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

knees, rolling the electric torch gently 
before you. We see now why in those 
good old days chests of drawers were 
popular — fortunately we have one of 
our own that somehow has got up the 
stairway; and we see also, as we begin 
to settle into it, what is perhaps the se- 
cret of this humbler colonial architec- 
ture. The Colonial Jack who built this 
house wanted some rooms round a 
chimney and a roof that the snow would 
slide off; and so he built it; and where- 
ever he found a space he made a closet 
or a cupboard; and because he had no 
other kind, he put in small-paned win- 
dows ; and all he did was substantial and 
honest — and beautiful, in its humble 
way, by accident. 

But about that bureau? 

Two strong, skillful men, engaged for 
the purpose, juggled with it, this way 
and that, muttering words of equally 

14 



GETTING SETTLED 

great strength — and it went upstairs. 
Had it been a quarter of an inch wider, 
they said afterward, the feat would 
have been impossible. It was a small 
margin, but it will save the company 
from having to knock timidly on the 
library door when it wishes to dress for 
dinner. 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

I HAVE read and heard much praise 
of open fires, but I recall no praise 
of bringing in the wood. There is, to be 
sure, the good old song: — 

Come bring with a noise, 

My merrie, merrie boys, 

The Christmas log to the firing; 

While my good dame, she 

Bids ye all make free, 

And drink to your heart's desiring. 

But this refers to a particular log, the 

Yule log (or clog, as they used to call it) 

which was brought in only once a year, 

and, even so, the singer evidently is not 

bringing it in himself. He is looking on. 

The merrie, merrie boys, he thinks, 

need encouragement. After they have 

got the log in, and the good dame has 

produced the rewarding jug, bowl, or 

bottle, everybody will feel better. Dry 

16 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

without and wet within; how oft, in- 
deed, has praise of open fire kept com- 
pany with praise of open bottle ! For- 
ests uncounted have been cut down, — 
the hillside beech, from where the owl- 
ets meet and screech ; the crackling pine, 
the cedar sweet, the knotted oak, with 
fragrant peat, — and burned up, stick 
by stick; so that, as the poet explains, 
the bright flames, dancing, winking, 
shall light us at our drinking. 

Others than inebriates have sung the 
praise of open fires ; but the most high- 
ly respectable, emulating the bright 
flames, have usually winked at drink- 
ing. But never one of them, so far as 
I remember, has praised the honest, 
wholesome, temperate exercise of bring- 
ing in the wood. 

And there is the Song That Has 
Never Been Sung — nor ever will be, 
so the tune is immaterial : — 
17 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

How jolly it is, of a cold winter morning, 
To pop out of bed just a bit before dawning, 
And, thinking the while of your jolly cold bath, 
To kindle a flame on your jolly cold hearth! 

Ah me, it is merry! 

Sing derry-down-derry ! 
Where now is the lark? I am up before him. 
I chuckle with glee at this quaint little whim. 
I make up the fire — pray Heaven it catches ! 
But what in the world have they done with the 
matches? 

Ah me, it is merry! 

Sing derry-down-derry! 

And so forth, and so forth. 

I invented that song myself, in Jan- 
uary, 191 8, when circumstances led me 

— so to speak, by the nape of the neck 

— to heat my home with wood because 
nowhere could I buy coal. But I felt no 
inpulse to sing it — simply a deeper, 
kindlier sympathy for forefather in the 
good old days before stoves and fur- 
naces. I do not blame him for not tak- 
ing a cold bath. I wish in vain that he 
had had the thing that I call a match. 

18 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

An archaeological authority tells me 
how forefather managed without it: — 

'Holding between the thumb and 
forefinger of the right hand a piece of 
imported gun-flint (long quarried at 
Brandon in Suffolk, England), strike it 
diagonally against a circlet of properly 
tempered steel held in the left hand, so 
that the spark flies downward on a dry, 
scorched linen rag lying in a tin cup 
(the tinder-box). When the spark in- 
stantly catches the rag, blow or touch 
it into flame against the sulphur-tipped 
end of a match, which will not other- 
wise ignite. Then with the burning 
match, light a candle socketed in the 
lid of the tinder-box, and smother the 
smouldering rag with an inner tin lid 
dropped upon it. Thus you were mas- 
ter of the house of a winter's morning 
when the fires were out.' 

But I would n't believe that archaeo- 
19 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

logical authority if he had added, 'sing- 
ing at your task.' Singeing at it seems 
more plausible. 

To many of us plain bread-and- 
butter persons, praise of open fires some- 
times seems a little too warm and com- 
fortable — too smugly contemplative. 
We like open fires. We would have 
them in every room in the house except 
the kitchen and bathroom — and per- 
haps in the bathroom, where we could 
hang our towels from the mantelpiece 
(as gallant practical gentlemen, now 
some centuries dead, named it by hang- 
ing up their wet mantles), and let them 
warm while we were taking our baths. 
We go as far as any in regarding the 
open fire as a welcoming host in the hall, 
an undisturbing companion in the li- 
brary, an encourager of digestion in the 
dining-room, an enlivener in the living- 
room, and a good-night thought of 
20 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

hospitality in the guest-chamber. But 
we cannot follow the essayist who speaks 
scornfully of hot-water pipes. 'From 
the security of ambush,' says he, 'they 
merely heat, and heat whose source is 
invisible is not to be coveted at all.' 

Oh, merely heat! The blithe gentle- 
man betrays himself out of his own ink- 
well. He may have forgotten it, — 
very likely somebody else takes care of 
it, — but there is a furnace in his cellar. 
Does he, we ask him seriously, covet 
the reciprocal affection of some beloved 
woman — start as angrily as he may at 
our suggestion of any comparison be- 
tween her and a hot-water pipe — only 
when he can see her? Or, supposing him 
a confirmed woman-hater, does he re- 
pudiate underwear? 

He brushes aside the questions. 
'With a fire in one's bedroom,' says he, 
'sleep comes witchingly.' 

21 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

'Unless,' say we, 'a spark or coal 
jumps out on the rug and starts to set 
the bedroom afire. Better,' say we, 
pursuing the subject in our heavy way, 
'a Philistine in bed than a fellow of fine 
taste stamping out a live coal with his 
bare feet.' 

And so we thank the thoughtful host 
who safely and sanely screens the open 
fire in his guest-chamber; but fie, fie 
upon him if he has decoratively ar- 
ranged on our temporary hearth Wood 
without Kindlings! 

If you give it half a chance, my 
friend, this 'joy perpetual,' as you call 
it, will eat you up. 

And yet we agree with anybody that 
nothing else in the house has appealed 
so long and so universally to the im- 
agination of man. It began before 
houses. Remote and little in the far 
perspective of time, we see a distant 

22 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

and awful-looking relative, whom we 
blush to acknowledge, kindling his fire; 
and that fire, open as all outdoors, was 
the seed and beginning of domestic 
living. With it, the Objectionable An- 
cestor learned to cook, and in this way 
differentiated himself from the beasts. 
Kindling it, he learned to swear, and 
differentiated himself further. Think- 
ing about it, his dull but promising 
mind conceived the advantage of hav- 
ing somebody else to kindle it; so he 
caught an awful-looking woman, and 
instituted the family circle. Soon, I 
fancy, he acquired the habit of sitting 
beside his fire when he should have been 
doing something more active; but a 
million years must pass before he was 
presentable, and another million before 
he had coat-tails, and could stand in 
front of it, spreading them like a pea- 
cock in the pride of his achievement — 

23 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

a Captain Bonavita turning his back on 
the lion. I would have you note, for 
what it may be worth, that praise of 
open fires has always been masculine 
rather than feminine. 

Nowadays, I judge, many of his de- 
scendants find the open fire much like 
a little movie theatre in the home. 
Under the proscenium arch of the fire- 
place the flames supply actors and 
scenery, and the show goes on indefi- 
nitely. It is better than a movie, for 
it has color, and lacks the agonizing 
facial contortions and interpolated text : 
'Even a Princess is just a girl — at 
Coney Island' ; ' It is like the nobility 
of your true heart, old friend, but I 
cannot accept the heroic sacrifice.' 

Sometimes it is useful. An author 
sits by the fire, and smokes; and soon 
the puppets of his next romance oblig- 
ingly appear and act a chapter for him. 
24 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

To-morrow he will dictate that chapter 
to his pretty stenographer. Sometimes 
it is consoling. A lover sits by the fire 
and smokes; presently he sees his love 
in the flames, and sighs — as Shake- 
speare would say — like a furnace. 
Sometimes it does n't work. / sit by 
the fire, and smoke; and I see nothing 
but fire and smoke. 

It is a pleasant place to sit — and yet 
how rapidly and unanimously, when 
coal came into use, and stoves came on 
the market, did people stop sitting, and 
brick up their fireplaces! They had no 
time for essays, but praise of stoves 
ascended wherever the wonderful things 
were available. A new world was born : 
stoves! kitchen ranges! furnaces! hot- 
water pipes! heat all over the house! 
— invisible, to be sure, but nobody 
seemed to worry about that. And out 
went the open fire — to be lit again 

25 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

later, but never again as a cooker of 
food and a warmer of the whole house. 
It came back to be sat by. 

There are times, indeed, — speaking 
as the spokesman of bread-and-butter, 
— when the open fire seems to stimu- 
late amazingly our powers of conversa- 
tion. We sparkle (for us) ; we become 
(or at least we feel) engagingly ani- 
mated; but is it really the open fire? I 
have met those with whom it is no more 
stimulating to sit cosily beside an open 
fire than cosily beside an open sea or an 
open trolley-car or an open window or an 
open oyster. I have known others in 
whose company a kitchen range seemed 
just as stimulating. 

Fires go out, but each new flame is a 
reincarnation. Our open fires are but 
miniatures of the old-time roarers that 
set the hall or tavern harmlessly ablaze, 
and lit its windows for the ruddy en- 
26 



PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES 

couragement of winter-blown travelers. 
Reverting to the menagerie for a figure, 
the open fires of the past were lions, 
those of to-day are cubs. Like cubs 
they amuse us; and so we forget what 
grim and tragic humors of life the open 
fire must necessarily have witnessed. 
Was it not before an open fire that 
Cain killed Abel? In the glow of those 
bright flames, dancing, winking, has 
been planned every villainy of which 
mankind is capable: winked they have 
at every sin that could be sinned by fire- 
light. Elemental and without morals, 
the open fire has lived in hovels as well 
as in palaces; it has lighted the student, 
heels in air and lying on his belly to 
study his book; the Puritan on his knees 
at prayer; the reveler, flat on his back 
and snoring in maudlin sleep under the 
table. And now, a luxury of the well- 
to-do, it is departing, dancing and wink- 

27 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

ing as usual, out of the universal life to 
which it has been as necessary as cooked 
food and warmth in winter. 

But perhaps, after all, it is not yet 
too late for praise of bringing in the 
wood. Let us at least provide the good 
old song, and trust to luck that four or 
five hundred years from now some imag- 
inative gentleman, digesting his dinner 
before a surviving open fire, will hear 
afar off the faint but jolly chorus: — 

Come, lads, all together, 

And get the wood in. 

This brisk zero weather 

Is pleasant as sin. 

Put on your warm hosen, 

And shuffle a bit; 

Your toes may be frozen 

Before you know it. 

To sit mug-a-mugging 

The fire who could, 

That might be out lugging 

In armfuls of wood? 

In — armfuls — of — wood ! 



FURNACE AND I 

SUMMER is the favorite time to 
advertise furnaces, for, although 
a pacifist might argue that being pre- 
pared for cold weather encourages frost, 
the practical persons who make and sell 
heating plants are firm believers in pre- 
paredness. They produce diagrams 
and pictures, showing how their furnace 
bisects the coal bill, and how easily a 
pretty child can run it from the front 
hall. 

But my furnace is different. I defy 
the prettiest child imaginable to run it. 
Indeed, in a strict sense, I defy anybody 
to run it ; for this furnace has a mind of 
its own and an odd ambition to behave 
like a thermometer. On a warm day it 
goes up, on a cold day it goes down; in 
zero weather it takes all the time of a 
29 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

determined man to head it off from be- 
coming a large, inconvenient refrigera- 
tor. As for bisecting coal bills, the crea- 
ture likes coal. I have even thought 
that it uttered strange, self-congratula- 
tory, happy noises whenever there oc- 
cured a rise in the price of its favorite 
edible. 

Before meeting this furnace I had 
lived in apartments, and my mental con- 
ception of a ton of coal had been as of 
something enormous, sufficient to heat 
the average house a month. A furnace 
was to me a remote mystery operated 
by a high priest called 'janitor,' whom 
I vaguely connected with the lines of 
Smollett, — 

Th' Hesperian dragon not more fierce and fell ; 
Nor the gaunt, growling janitor of Hell. 

I took my heat as a matter of course. If 

I wanted more of it, I spoke warmly to 

the janitor through a speaking tube, 

30 



FURNACE AND I 

and — after a while — there was more 
heat. If I wanted less, I spoke to him 
coldly, in the same distant, godlike way, 
and — after a while — there was less 
heat. In neither case, I discovered, did 
an ordinary tone of voice get any result 
whatever; and, although a fat man 
himself, he sometimes growled back 
through the tube very much like the 
gaunt specimen mentioned by Smollett. 
But I gave little thought to him. I had 
what is called an 'intelligent idea' that 
to produce more heat he opened a 
'draft,' and to reduce heat he closed it, 
the effect of a draft on a furnace being 
just the opposite to its effect on a jan- 
itor. At night he ' shook the furnace 
down,' in the morning he 'shook the 
furnace up.' One gathers such knowl- 
edge casually, without conscious effort 
or realization. I had in fact no more 
curiosity about the furnace than about 

3i 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

the sun, for I seemed as unlikely to run 
one heater as the other. 

Then, like many another man who 
has lived in apartments, I turned sub- 
urbanite. I had a furnace, and I had to 
run it myself. How well I remember 
that autumn day when I started my 
first furnace fire! 

There sat the monster on the floor 
of the cellar, impassive as Buddha, and 
apparently holding up the house with 
as many arms as an octopus — hollow 
arms through which presently would 
flow the genial heat. I peeked cau- 
tiously through a little door into his 
stomach, and marveled at its hollow 
immensity. I reached in till my arm 
ached — and my hand dangled in empty 
space. But my intelligence told me 
that there must be a bottom. Crum- 
pling a newspaper into a great wad, I 
dropped it down, down into the mon- 
32 



FURNACE AND I 

ster's gullet, where it vanished forever. 
I crumpled and dropped another; I con- 
tinued, until at last — oh, triumph of 
mind and industry over incalculable 
depth ! — I saw newspaper, and had 
something tangible on which to erect a 
pyre of kindlings. Where I could reach 
I laid them crosswise, and where I could 
n't I tossed them in at varying angles, 
gaining skill with practice. 

* It is like a great wooden nest ! ' cried 
I in astonishment. k Now I know why 
the coal I have bought for my furnace 
is called "egg"' 

I lit the fire and made a grand 
smoke. 

It rose through the kindlings; it piled 
out through the little door; it hung like 
great cobwebs to the roof of the cellar. 
With great presence of mind I hastily 
closed the little door and ran lightly up 
the cellar-stairs. The smoke had pre- 

33 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

ceded me ; it got there first through the 
registers ; and more was coming. 

I met a woman. 

'Is the house afire?' she asked ex- 
citedly. 

I calmed her. 'It is not' I replied 
quietly, in a matter-of-course way. 
1 When you start a fire for the winter it 
always smokes a little.' 

We opened the windows. We went 
outside and looked at the house. It 
leaked smoke through every crevice 
except, curiously enough, the chimney. 
Ah-h-h-h-h! I saw what had happened. 
I groped my way to the cellar and 
opened the back damper. Now the 
smoke went gladly up the chimney, and 
the view through the little door was at 
once beautiful and awful: it was like 
looking into the heart of an angry vol- 
cano. Evidently it was time to lay the 
eggs on the nest. 

34 



FURNACE AND I 

I shoveled the abyss full of coal, and 
the volcano became extinct. Presently, 
instead of a furnace full of fire, I had a 
furnace full of egg coal. I began taking 
it out, egg by egg, at first with my fin- 
gers and then with the tongs from the 
dining-room fireplace. And when the 
woman idly questioned me as to what I 
was going to do down cellar with the 
tongs, I bit my lips. 

To the man who runs it (an absurd 
term as applied to a thing that has no 
legs and weighs several tons) the fur- 
nace is his first thought in the morn- 
ing and his last thought at night. 
His calendar has but two seasons — 
winter, when the furnace is going, 
and summer, when the furnace is out. 
But in summer his thoughts are nat- 
urally more philosophical. He sees 
how r profoundly this recent invention 
(which he is not at the time running) 

35 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

has changed man's attitude toward 
nature. 

I am, of course, not referring to those 
furnaces which are endowed with more 
than the average human intelligence; 
those superfurnaces which are met with 
in the advertisements, which shake 
themselves down, shovel their own coal, 
carry and sift their own ashes, regulate 
their own draughts, and, if they do not 
actually order and pay for their own 
coal, at least consume it as carefully as 
if they did. 

With a furnace like mine a man ex- 
periences all the emotions of which he 
is capable. He loves, he hates, he ad- 
mires, he despises, he grieves, he exults. 
There have been times when I have felt 
like patting my furnace; and again, 
times when I have slammed his little 
door and spoken words to him far, far 
hotter than the fire that smouldered and 
36 



FURNACE AND I 

refused to burn in his bowels. I judge 
from what I have read that taming a 
wild animal must be a good deal like 
taming a furnace, with one important 
exception : the wild-animal-tamer never 
loses his temper or the beast would kill 
him; but a furnace, fortunately for 
suburban mortality, cannot kill its 
tamer. 

When his furnace happens to be good- 
natured, however, a man will often find 
the bedtime hour with it pleasant and 
even enjoyable. He descends, hum- 
ming or whistling, to the cellar; and 
the subsequent shaking and shoveling 
is, after all, no more than a healthy ex- 
ercise which he would not otherwise 
take and which will make him sleep 
better. He is friendly with this rotund, 
coal-eating giant; he regards it almost 
like a big baby which he is putting to bed 
— or, at least, he might so regard it if 
37 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

putting a baby to bed was one of his re- 
cognized pleasures. 

But, oh, what a difference in the 
morning! He awakes in the dark, 
startled perhaps from some pleasant 
dream by the wild alarm-m-m-m of a 
clock under his pillow; and outside the 
snug island of warmth on which he lies, 
the Universe stretches away in every 
direction, above, below, and on every 
side of him, cold, dreary, and unfit for 
human habitation, to and beyond the 
remotest star. In that cold Universe 
how small he is ! — how warm and how 
weak! Instantly he thinks of the fur- 
nace, and the remotest star seems near 
by comparison. The thought of getting 
up and going down cellar seems as un- 
real as the thought of getting up and 
going to meet the sun at that pale streak 
which, through his easterly window, 
heralds the reluctant coming of another 

38 



FURNACE AND I 

day. Yet he knows that he must, and 
that eventually he will, get up. In vain 
he tells himself how splendid, how in- 
vigorating will be the plunge from his 
warm bed right into the fresh, brisk, 
hygienic morning air. 

The fresh, brisk, hygienic morning 
air does not appeal to him. Unwil- 
lingly he recalls a line in the superfur- 
nace advertisement, — ' Get up warm 
and cosy,' — and helplessly wishes that 
he had such a furnace. 'Like Andrew 
Carnegie!' he adds bitterly. At that 
moment he would anarchistically as- 
sassinate Andrew, provided he could do 
it without getting up. Nevertheless — 
he gets up! He puts on — 'Curse it, 
where is that sleeve?' — the bath-robe 
and slippers that have been all night 
cooling for him, and starts on his lonely 
journey through the tomblike silence. 
Now, if ever, is the time to hum, but 

39 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

there is not a hum in him : down, down, 
down he goes to the cellar and peeks 
with dull hope through the familiar 
little door. 'Good morning, Fire.' He 
shakes, he shovels, he opens drafts and 
manipulates dampers. And the Fur- 
nace, impassive, like a Buddha holding 
up the house with as many arms as an 
octopus, seems to be watching him with 
a grave yet idle interest. Which is all 
the more horrible because it has no face. 



NO STAIRS! — NO ATTIC 

ATTICS are done for! Listen to the 
words of the man who has built, 
and written about, what he calls a Serv- 
antless Cottage : — 

1 Climbing stairs is ofttimes too stren- 
uous for the happy housewife, so there 
must be no stairs.' 

Shades of our grandmothers! If we 
can believe this enthusiastic designer 
and builder, only a few more decades 
at most will miserable women, unhappy 
housewives, and, by inference, undesir- 
able mothers, continue to drag up and 
down stairs their pitiful existences in 
houses of more than one story. 

'No stairs! No stairs!' the young wife cried, 

And clapped her hands to see 
A house as like a little flat 

As any house could be ! 



41 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

And observe also, not only the van- 
ishing of stairs and attics, but the disap- 
pearance of the servant-problem. ' For 
in this Servantless Cottage,' says the 
satisfied man, 'milady need fear no 
drudgery. A very few hours will suffice 
for housekeeping and cookery. Work 
becomes a pleasure and a maid unde- 
sirable.' 

Well, well! There have been a good 
many proposed solutions of the domes- 
tic service question — but to solve it by 
giving it up seems no very crowning tri- 
umph of domestic mathematics. The 
experience of innumerable young mar- 
ried couples with kitchenettes goes to 
show that life can be conducted under 
that solution, especially when the cou- 
ples are young and but recently married. 
Then, indeed, they need neither an at- 
tic in the top of the house nor a general 
— that brave girl capable of turning a 
42 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

quick efficient hand to everything from 
dusting to doughnuts — all over it. 
But why not, for that matter, admit that 
' climbing is of ttimes too strenuous for a 
happy general.' She, too is human — 
has legs — gets tired — 

This designer of servantless cottages 
was, I imagine, an atticless child: he 
climbed no stairs to that room of pleas- 
ing mystery, rich in dusty and discarded 
things that had once been living and 
important in the life of his family, where 
the sunbeams streamed like a ladder 
down through the skylight, or, on other 
days, the drops of water pelted its nar- 
row panes and added their orchestral 
voices to the symphony of rain on the 
roof. His grandparents had died when 
he was a baby; their house had been 
sold or torn down, their attic accumula- 
tions scattered, and his family lived in 
a new house where the attic had as yet 
43 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

taken on no more attraction to juvenile 
adventure than the spare bedroom. 
He was, probably, a thoughtful child 
who brooded over his mother's troubles 
in securing and keeping satisfactory 
'help.' The house in which he passed 
those young years was very likely built 
in the time of high ceilings and long 
flights of stairs, — how often, through 
the banisters, had the little fellow seen 
his mother's tired ankles lagging on the 
ascent as he sat in the library poring 
over some volume of architecture! — 
and he took a childish oath that when 
he married — how little he knew about 
that ! — his wife should not have to 
climb stairs, his wife should not have to 
worry about servants. Yet for a long 
time it seemed as if he would never 
marry, for it did not occur to him to put 
in an escalator. And then one day, in 
his maturity, spurred perhaps by a more 

44 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

understanding and ardent desire, and 
driven harder by the unselfish thought 
that, even while he dreamed, she might 
marry somebody else and be doomed 
for life to climbing stairs and engaging 
new servants, he saw the solution. He 
would build a house of only one story 
and let her do the work. 

Now, as a matter of fact, a bungalow 
is a pretty good thing. If this student 
of architecture and domestic economics 
had contented himself with a plain and 
simple description of his servantless 
cottage, I dare say I should have read 
it in the most friendly spirit imaginable: 
and certainly with no desire to criticize 
his conclusions. It was that silly re- 
mark about 'milady' that aroused op- 
position. We live in a republic and we 
are most of us reasonably self-respecting 
men and women, not a milady among 
us, unless she happens to be making a 

45 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

visit — in which case, one place she is 
not visiting is a servantless cottage. 
And so, in a word, the servantless cot- 
tage ceases to be an honest, more or less 
successful effort to provide a home in 
which the housewife can most conven- 
iently do her own work, and appears a 
neat little example of snobbish absurd- 
ity. Work becomes a pleasure to the 
happy housewife for whom climbing a 
flight of stairs is ofttimes all too strenu- 
ous — so keen and persistent a pleasure 
that domestic service is 'undesirable!' 
Is anybody really expected to believe 
it? Or is domestic service itself a phase 
of domesticity that can be so cheerfully 
eliminated? Has the servant — and, 
bless you! the word has often enough 
been a term of honor — no really fine 
and enduring place in the scheme of 
gracious and cultivated domestic man- 
agement? 

46 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

For many generations, stairs and ser- 
vice have been inseparable from the 
amenities of domestic living. One has 
only to imagine these two essentials 
suddenly eliminated from literature, to 
experience a pained sensation at the 
care-free way in which the man of the 
servantless cottage gets rid of them. 
And one has only to look about the 
world as it stands at present, servant- 
problem and all, to realize that it is the 
value of good domestic service which 
actually creates and keeps alive the 
problem itself. For even if the happy 
housewife enjoys every single item of 
housekeeping and cookery, there are 
times when her personal attention to 
them is obviously undesirable. 

Imagine our servantless cottage as 
an example. Milady sings at her work. 
The portable vacuum cleaner — milord 
keeps up with all the latest improve- 

47 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

merits — gratefully eats up its daily 
dust. The tireless cooker prepares the 
meals 'with a perfection and delicious- 
ness unrealized in the old days.' A bas 
mother and the way she used to cook! 
But in serving these meals of a hitherto 
unrealized perfection and deliciousness, 
milord and milady must needs chase 
each other between kitchen and dining- 
room. The guest at dinner, if he is 
luckily accustomed to picnics, carries 
his own plate and washes it afterward. 
I have myself entertained many a guest 
in this fashion, and he has carried his 
own plate, and, being that kind of a 
guest or I would n't have invited him, 
he has cheerfully helped wash the 
dishes, wearing a borrowed apron. But 
it would be absurd to claim that this 
performance, indefinitely repeated, is 
an improvement upon an orderly, effi- 
ciently served dinner-party. Conversa- 
48 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

tion at dinner is more desirable than a 
foot-race between the courses ; nor do I 
believe that life under such conditions 
can possibly 'become so alluring that 
one day the great majority of us will 
choose it first of all.' 

Concerning stairs: I perhaps have 
more feeling for them than most ; but I 
am quite sure that I speak at least for a 
large minority. It is the flatness of the 
flat, its very condensed and restricted 
cosiness, its very lack of upstairs and 
downstairs, which prevents it from ever 
attaining completely the atmosphere of 
a home. The feet which cross the floor 
above your head are those of another 
family; the sounds which reach you 
from below are the noises of strangers; 
the life horizontal of the flat serves its 
convenient use but only emphasizes the 
independence and self-respect of the 
life vertical, master of the floor above, 

49 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

master likewise of the basement. I, 
who have lived happily in a flat, never- 
theless feel more human, less like some 
ingeniously constructed doll, when I 
can take my candle in hand and go up- 
stairs to sleep. Because I have lived 
happily in a flat, I want no bungalow. 
There is something fine in going to 
sleep even one flight nearer the stars — 
and away from the dining-room. 

And no stairs — no attic. My con- 
viction increases that this man was an 
atticless child, without grandparents 
himself, and without thought of his own 
possible grandchildren. Or is the stair- 
less, servantless, atticless cottage — 
' truly the little house is the house of the 
future' — meant also to be childless? 
An examination of the plan shows a so- 
called bedroom marked 'guest or chil- 
dren,' which indicates that the happy 
housewife must exercise her own judg- 

50 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

ment. There are accommodations for 
one guest or two children, but it seems 
fairly evident that guest and children 
exclude each other. Milord and milady 
must decide between hospitality and 
race-suicide, or two children and no 
week-end visitor. Some will choose 
guest; some will choose children. Per- 
sonally I hope they will all choose chil- 
dren; for, even without an attic, there 
is plenty of playground. ' People with 
tiny incomes' must always be careful 
not to purchase too small a lot; and so 
we find that the servantless cottage has 
paths, and a lawn, and flowers, and 
shrubbery, and a sun-dial, and an 
American elm, and a 'toadstool can- 
opy ' between the poplars and the white 
birches, and an ivy-covered 'cache' to 
store the trunks in. I am glad there is 
going to be such a domestic conven- 
ience as a sun-dial ; and perhaps, when 

5i 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

there is a guest, the trunks can be taken 
out on the lawn and the children put to 
bed in the 'cache.' 

But I guess that, after all, stairs will 
survive, and attics, and the servant- 
problem. Innumerable families are al- 
ready living in servantless houses, with 
stairs, and it does n't even occur to 
them that they are solving any prob- 
lem whatsoever. Innumerable house- 
wives are about as happy under these 
conditions as most of us get to be under 
any conditions. The servant-problem 
itself is not the young and tender prob- 
lem that many of us imagine. An exam- 
ination of old newspapers will show any- 
body who is sufficiently patient and 
curious that a hundred years ago there 
was much indignant wonder that young 
women, visibly suited for domestic serv- 
ice, preferred to be seamstresses! What 
is more modern is the grave enthusiasm 
52 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

with which so many persons are trying 
to decide how the rest of us shall live 
with the maximum amount of comfort 
and culture for the minimum expendi- 
ture. And one interesting similarity 
between many of these suggestions is 
their passive opposition to another im- 
portant group of critics. 

'Have large families or perish as a 
nation!' shriek our advisers on one 
hand. ' Have small families or perish as 
individuals!' proclaim our advisers on 
the other. 

For this servantless cottage is typical 
of a good many other housing sugges- 
tions in which the essential element is 
the small family; and even the possibil- 
ity that the children may live to grow 
up seems to have been left out of con- 
sideration. Milord and milady, I imag- 
ine, have chosen children instead of a 
guest. These children (a boy and girl, 

53 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

as I like to picture them) grow up; 
marry; settle in their own servantless 
cottages, and have two children apiece. 
There are now a grandfather and a 
grandmother, a son and a daughter, a 
son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and 
four grandchildren. In each servant- 
less cottage there is that one bedroom 
marked 'guest or children.' Granting 
all the possibilities of the ivy-covered 
'cache,' — and now the trunks will 
simply have to be taken out and stood 
on the lawn even if the snow does fall 
on them, — milord and milady, come 
Christmas or other anniversary, can 
entertain a visit from all their children 
and grandchildren, one family taking 
the 'guest or children' bedroom, and 
the other the 'cache.' Later, as the 
children grow older, each family will 
come back to the old home on alternate 
Christmases: and by utilizing the 

54 



NO STAIRS — NO ATTIC 

'cache,' a son or daughter can receive a 
short visit from the aged parents, not 
too long, of course, or it would ruin the 
trunks. As for any of the hearty, old- 
fashioned, up-and-down-stairs hospi- 
tality — I may be an old fogey myself, 
but the servantless cottage shocks me. 
' Our bedroom resembles a cosy state- 
room on board ship.' Oh ! la-la-la-la-la! 
Why does n't somebody solve the prob- 
lem of domestic living by suggesting 
that we all live in house-boats? 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

MANY a man, I am sure, who never 
in his mature life thinks emo- 
tionally of his own kitchen, still keeps 
a tender memory of some kitchen of 
his early youth. It may have been 
his mother's, his grandmother's, or his 
Aunt Susan's; and not often, but once in 
a great while, something reminds him 
of it. His thoughts hark back, and he 
touches, in his own degree, the emotion 
of Uncle Felix (whom you will remem- 
ber if you have ever read 'The Extra 
Day') alone at night in Mrs. Horton's 
kitchen. 

1 And Uncle Felix traveled backwards 
against the machinery of Time that 
cheats the majority so easily with its 
convention of moving hands and ticking 
voice and bullying, staring visage. He 
56 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

slid swiftly down the long banister- 
descent of years, and reached in a flash 
that old sombre Yorkshire kitchen, and 
stood, four- foot nothing, face smudged 
and fingers sticky, beside the big deal 
table with the dying embers of the grate 
upon his right. His heart was beating. 
He could just reach the juicy cake with- 
out standing on a chair. He ate the 
very slice that he had eaten forty years 
ago. It was possible to have your cake 
and eat it too ! ' 

For my own part, — and no doubt 
each backward traveler has his par- 
ticular kitchen memory, — I ate the 
crisp brown beans off the top of the 
bean-pot. It was a sort of ceremonial; 
a Saturday-night function, irrespective 
of whatever menial might at the time 
be in official charge of our kitchendom. 
The baking of the beans was never alto- 
gether trusted to a menial. My mother, 

57 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

last thing before bed, would go out to 
the kitchen, lighting her way with a 
kerosene lamp ; and I with her. We put 
the lamp on the table; we opened the 
oven door — and all over the kitchen 
spread the delectable, mouth-watering 
aroma of the baking bean. We took 
out the bean-pot. Then we scraped off 
the crisp top layer of the beans into a 
saucer. And these we ate ! 

My mother wore a bustle, and at that 
historic period there were no kitchen- 
ettes; nor had the Spirit of Efficiency 
inspired the thought of planning your 
kitchen with a route for food-prepara- 
tion which makes a flying start at the 
ice-chest, takes in the meat, fish, and 
vegetable shelves, touches at the cab- 
inet for dough-mixing, skirts the pan 
cabinet, and so (as Master Pepys would 
say) to the stove. There were no scien- 
tifically determined routes for food-serv- 
58 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

ing and dish-washing. Each menial, 
and my mother herself between menials, 
followed a kind of cow path. My 
mother had never had it figured out for 
her that the lowest estimate of time 
spent at the sink alone is two hours 
daily, and that these two hours a day 
count up to five days of twelve hours 
each in the course of a month, or sixty 
twelve-hour days at the sink every year. 
And when, as the expert modern kitchen- 
planner points out, it is realized that 
these sixty days are spent in useless 
stooping, and that, to this strain, is 
added the fatigue of miles of unnec- 
essary steps, one gets an idea of the 
kitchen which I am glad to think never 
occurred to her. 

Nor, on the other hand, do I think 
my mother would have quite followed 
the mental state of the rhapsodist who 
writes of housework in general, — 

59 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

'When I am about the house, taking 
part in the work, I am of course con- 
scious, among other things, of the 
rhythmical qualities of housework. But 
when I stay apart from it, and listen 
to it, it comes to seem all rhythm, both 
in the larger sense of regular recurrence 
of tasks, and in the repetition of sounds 
with insistent ichthus and pause. Iron- 
ing, for example, is nearly as pleasant 
to listen to as to watch. Not by 
one stroke of the iron, but by many, 
is the linen polished and the cambric 
smoothed to a satin daintiness; the 
blows follow one another, now slowly, 
now fast, like the drum-beat of some 
strange march. There is rhythm in the 
kitchen; rhythm in the dining-room. 
. . . Most soothing of all household 
rhythm is the swish of the broom. It is 
gentle and low-keyed. It takes my 
attention from other things, and makes 
60 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

me think of abstractions. I wonder 
whether there is not some mathematical 
calculation by which a ratio can be es- 
tablished between power of stroke, 
length of arm, and good-will. And so 
speculating I sink into comfortable 
depths of nothingness.' 

Oh, shade of Mary Ann, the Perfect 
Servant Girl ! 

But this digression into the 'ichthus 
and pause' of housework — I seem to 
hear my mother, 'Who is the lunatic?' 
— takes me away from the kitchen. 
I hurry back to it, for, although it is 
not a place where I wish to live, it is 
very much a place where I like to visit. 
Though not with the cook. When I 
was younger, I enjoyed visiting with 
the cook, but the years have separated 
us; I have, as it were, grown apart 
from her. Granting her absence, there 
is a homely, cheery informality about 
61 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

a kitchen ; and if the lady of the house 
will take you there herself, some rainy 
afternoon in the country, and serve 
tea on the clean, plain table, and 
let you butter the toasted crackers 
yourself, with all the butter you please, 
why, for my part, I ask no more this 
side of Paradise. To use a quaint old 
obsolete word, I like to be 'kitchened' 
— provided, of course, that I may se- 
lect my kitchener. So, I understand, 
does the policeman: our tastes are dif- 
ferent, but we are both human. 

And yet this kitchen, as we know it 
to-day, is comparatively recent, and 
already insidiously passing away from 
the larger cities to, I hope, a long survi- 
val in the country and suburbs. If I 
were of an older generation (also insid- 
iously passing away) , I would be able to 
recall another kind of kitchen, where 
colonial customs of cookery held sway 
62 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

well into the twentieth century. To me 
the stove seems ancient only because, 
thank God ! I am not ancient myself ; I 
find it hard to believe that when my 
grandmother bought her stove, her up- 
to-date spirit marched bravely from one 
period of kitchendom into another. 
But men still living remember how their 
very mothers baked bread in a brick 
oven, and have seen in operation many 
of the queer old cooking things we 
somewhat younger mortals wonder at 
in museums. Only a bit further back, 
the fireplace, at its most generous, had 
room for a seat in the corner, and 
grandmother sat there, — it was really 
what the kitchen-planners would call a 
rest corner, — sometimes, comfortable 
old creature, smoking her honest pipe 
and observing the stars by daytime as 
she watched the smoke on its journey 
up the big chimney. But the new- 

63 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

fangled kitchen range was much more 
convenient ; the easier management of a 
coal fire made a new day in household 
economics; a delighted generation bus- 
ily bricked up the fireplaces. And so 
the sturdy useful kitchen stove is not so 
very ancient; and the homely, hospita- 
ble kitchen, even of our childhood mem- 
ory, is still so new that only to-day is 
the Spirit of Efficiency providing it 
with routes of travel to save those 
wasted steps that mother used to take, 
and a cosy rest corner, cunningly placed 
to solace the soul of a tired cook with 
prophylactic contemplation of the most 
restful available scenery. 

All day long on the kitchen routes 

Her helpful feet have gone, 
With never a senseless, wasted step 

Between the dusk and dawn; 

And now, dear soul, at the kitchen sink 
She has washed the final spoon, 

And sat her down in her rest corner 
To look at the rising moon. 

6 4 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

But the life of our larger cities is 
growingly inimical to kitchens. In the 
more distinguished sections, unfortu- 
nately, one must be more than ordinarily 
well-to-do to live in a house that has a 
kitchen : otherwise one lives in an apart- 
ment and has a kitchenette. In my 
bright lexicon, published by the Cen- 
tury Company in 1889, there is no such 
word. The thing did not exist. This 
Peter Pan of domestic institutions, the 
baby kitchen that never grows up, had 
yet to be born. And a great army of 
other equally unborn babies, who would 
be shrewdly created male and female, 
waited in the mystery of non-existence 
until such time as they, too, should 
enter upon life, grow up, discover each 
other in happily surprised couples, love, 
marry, and set up housekeeping with 
two rooms, a bath, and a kitchenette. 
It was then impossible — though I have 

65 . 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

since done it myself — for a gentleman 
to take his morning bath, shave, and 
cook the breakfast all at the same time, 
stepping with accurate judgment out of 
his porcelain bath-tub and into the con- 
tiguous kitchenette, and so back and 
forth, bathing, lathering, shaving, per- 
colating the coffee, and turning the 
toast. Perhaps, also, humming a little 
tune. 

Here, too, as the rhapsodist I have 
already quoted would say, is rhythm; 
nor is it impossible that the same imag- 
ination would find a wild yet orderly 
beauty in the design extemporized by 
his wet footprints between his kitchen- 
ette and his bath-tub. 

But the thing is n't a kitchen, though 
it serves many of the kitchen's practical 
purposes. It lacks the space, dignity, 
comfort, and opportunity for helpful 
conversation. I cannot imagine any 
66 



CONCERNING KITCHENS 

gentleman of the future recalling with 
poignant pleasure his childhood kitch- 
enette. In fact, I cannot even imagine a 
child in a kitchenette. 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

DID you ever,' said he, 'know a 
plumber who had grown rich?' 
We stood in the kitchen. Outdoors 
it was a wonderful winter morning, 
snow-white and sparkling, felt rather 
than seen through frosted windows, for 
the mercury last night had dropped 
below zero, and, although reported on 
the way up, was not climbing with real 
enthusiasm. On the floor was a little 
sea of water, in shape something like 
the Mediterranean, with Gibraltar out 
of sight under the kitchen sink. The 
stove (unfortunately) had been lighted ; 
and a strange, impassive boy stood be- 
side it, holding in pendant hands vari- 
ous tools of the plumber's craft. The 
plumber stood in the Mediterranean. 
And I, in my slippers and bath-robe, — 
68 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

a foolish costume, for the sea was not 
deep enough to bathe in, — hovered, 
so to speak, on the edge of the beach. 

I suppose I wished to impress this 
plumber with my imperturbable calm. 
Upset as I was, I must have realized the 
impossibility of impressing the boy. 
Swaggering a little in my bath-robe, 
I had said something jocular, I do not 
remember just what, about the rapid 
accretion of wealth by plumbers. He 
lit his pipe. 'Did you ever,' said he, 
'know a plumber who had grown rich?' 

Now until that winter I had never 
thought of the plumber as a man in 
many respects like myself. One may 
winter for years in a city apartment 
without meeting a plumber, but hardly 
without reading a good many humor- 
ous trifles about them in current litera- 
ture ; and my idea of this craftsman had 
been insidiously formed by the minor 
69 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

humorists. Summer, in my experience, 
had been a plumberless period, in which 
water flowed freely through the pipes of 
my house, and gushed obligingly from 
faucets at the touch of a finger. It 
was like an invisible brook; and, like 
a brook, I thought of it (if I thought of 
it at all) as going on forever. Nothing 
worse happened than a leak at the fau- 
cet. And when that happens I can fix 
it myself. All it needs is a new washer. 
I run down cellar and turn off the 
water. I run up from the cellar and 
take off the faucet. I put in the new 
washer, which is like a very fat leather 
ring for a very thin finger, and screw on 
the faucet. I run down cellar, turn on 
the water, run up from the cellar, and 
look at the faucet. It still leaks. So I 
run down cellar, turn off the water, run 
up from the cellar, take off the faucet, 
make some slight alteration in the size, 
70 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

shape, or position of the washer, put 
on the faucet, run down cellar, turn on 
the water, run up from the cellar, and 
look at the faucet. If it still leaks (as is 
rather to be expected), I repeat as be- 
fore ; and if it then leaks (as is more than 
likely), I run down cellar, turn off the 
water, run up from the cellar, take off 
the faucet, make some slight alteration 
in the size, shape, or position of the 
washer, put on the faucet, run down 
cellar, turn on the water, run up from 
the cellar, and look at the faucet. Per- 
haps it leaks more. Perhaps it leaks 
less. So I run down cellar — and turn 
off the water — and run up from the 
cellar — and take off the faucet. Then, 
talking aloud to myself, I take out the 
new washer, throw it on the floor, 
stamp on it, kick it out of the way, put 
in a newer washer, put on the faucet, 
run down cellar, turn on the water, run 

7i 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

up from the cellar, and look at the fau- 
cet. If (and this may happen) it still 
leaks, I make queer, inarticulate, ani- 
mal noises; but I run down cellar, turn 
off the water, run up from the cellar, 
and take off the faucet. Then I mon- 
key a little with the washer (still mak- 
ing those queer animal noises), put on 
the faucet, run down cellar, turn on the 
water, run up from the cellar, and look 
at the faucet. Sooner or later the faucet 
always stops leaking. It is a mere mat- 
ter of adjusting the washer; any handy 
man can do it with a little patience. 

Winter in the country is the time and 
place to get acquainted with the 
plumber. And I would have you re- 
member, even in that morning hour when 
the ordinary life of your home has stop- 
ped in dismay, and then gone limping 
toward breakfast with the help of buck- 
ets of water generously loaned you 
72 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

by your nearest neighbor, — rarely, if 
ever, does he carry his generosity so 
far as to help carry the buckets, — 
that because of this honest soul in over- 
alls, winter has lost the terrors which it 
held for your great-grandfather. 

Revisit your library, and note what 
the chroniclers of the past thought 
about winter — 'this cousin to Death, 
father to sickness, and brother to old 
age' (as Thomas Dekker bitterly called 
it; and well would your great-grand- 
father have agreed with him), when 
'the first word that a wench speaks on 
your coming into a room in the morn- 
ing is, " Prithee send for some faggots." ' 
It is bad enough when — to adapt Dek- 
ker's sixteenth-century phraseology — 
the first word that a wench speaks on 
your coming into a room in the morn- 
ing is, 'Prithee send for a plumber'; 
but how seldom it happens! And be- 

73 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

cause we can send for a plumber, our 
attitude toward winter is joyfully 
changed for the better: lovely autumn 
is no longer regarded as melancholy be- 
cause winter is coming, nor is backward 
spring esteemed beyond criticism be- 
cause winter is over. 

Those good old days, after the sun 
had entered Capricorn, were cold and 
inconvenient old days. Observe great- 
grandfather: all his plumbing was a 
pump, which often froze beyond his sim- 
ple skill in plumbery; and then he drew 
water from the well in a dear old oaken 
bucket (as we like to think of it), emp- 
tied it into other buckets, and carried 
it by hand, even as a man now carries 
the water loaned him by his generous 
neighbor, wherever the useful, unin- 
toxicating fluid was needed. No invis- 
ible brook flowed through his house, 
and gushed obligingly at faucets, hot 

74 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

or cold according to great-grandfath- 
er's whim; no hot-water pipes suffused 
his dwelling with grateful warmth. 
These are our blessings — and it is the 
plumber, with only a boy to help him, 
who contends manfully against the 
forces of nature, and keeps them going. 
For the life of the house depends now- 
adays on its healthy circulation of 
water; and when the house suffers from 
arteriosclerosis, the plumber is the doc- 
tor, and the strange, impassive boy is 
the trained nurse. 

Sometimes in an emergency he ar- 
rives without this little companion: I 
have myself, rising to the same occa- 
sion, taken the boy's place. I was a 
good boy. The plumber admitted it. 
1 Fill th' kettle again with hot water off 
th' stove, 'said he, over his arched back, 
as he peered shrewdly down a pipe to 
see how far away it was frozen, 'there's 

75 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

th' good boy.' Thus I know that the 
boy is not, as our minor humorists 
would have us believe, a mere flourish 
and gaudy appanage to the plumber's 
autocratically assumed grandeur. His 
strange, impassive manner is probably 
nothing more or less than concentra- 
ted attention; it is as if he said, with 
Hamlet, 'Yea, from the table of my 
memory I'll wipe away all foolish, fond 
regards, all saws of books, all forms, all 
pressures past, that youth and obser- 
vation copied there; and thy command- 
ment all alone shall live within the book 
and volume of my brain, unmixed with 
baser matter. Yes, by Heaven ! ' 

Even in putting in a new washer, 
I should do better with a boy. 

The most nervous and conscientious 

plumber, I tell you, must at intervals 

appear, to an observer unacquainted 

with the art and mystery of plumbery, 

76 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

to be proceeding in a leisurely and per- 
haps idle fashion. The most method- 
ical and conscientious man, plumber 
or not, will occasionally forget some- 
thing, and have to go back for it. The 
most self-respecting and conscientious 
minor humorist, after he has exhausted 
his witty invention making a joke on a 
plumber, will try to sell it for the high- 
est possible price. And if I, for ex- 
ample, am a little proud of my ability, 
greater than the plumber's, to write an 
essay, how shall I accuse him of arro- 
gance if he is a little proud of his abil- 
ity, greater than mine, to accomplish 
the more necessary feat of thawing a 
frozen water-pipe? 

He has a heart. 

When I was a plumber's boy myself, 

I walked with my boss to his office in 

the village to get a tool. It was a 

Sunday afternoon: I remember that a 

77 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

rooster crowed afar off, and how his 
lonely clarion enhanced and made more 
gravely quiet the peace of the Sabbath. 
And the plumber said, ' I would n't have 
felt right, sitting at home by the fire 
reading the paper, when I knew you 
was in trouble and I could pull you out.' 
He had come, mark you, in his Sunday 
clothes; he had come in his best, not 
pausing even for his overalls, so that, 
in our distressed, waterless home, the 
lady of the house had herself encircled 
his honest waist with a gingham apron 
before he began plumbing. And in all 
the world there was nobody else whom 
we would have been so glad to see. 

And so, bowing, with my left hand 
over what I take to be the region of a 
grateful heart, I extend him this 
praise of plumber. No plumber came 
over in the Mayflower; but think not, 
for that reason, that he is a parvenu. He 
78 



THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED 

is of ancient lineage — this good fairy 
in overalls of our invisible brooks. The 
Romans knew him as the artifex plitm- 
bareus. Caesar may have interrupted 
the revision of the Commentaries to send 
for him. He disappeared, with civiliza- 
tion and water-pipes, in the Dark Ages ; 
he came back, with civilization and 
water-pipes, when the darkness lifted. 
Neglected by Art, disregarded by Ro- 
mance, and unconsidered by the drama, 
these rich and entertaining expressions 
of life are as nothing when his presence 
is called for. 

We may live without painters 

Or writers or mummers, 
But civilized man cannot 

Live without plumbers. 

He, too, should have his statue, not 

of bronze, marble, or granite, but of 

honest lead, with two figures — the 

Plumber, holding aloft his torch, and 

79 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

the Plumber's Boy, strange, impassive, 
and holding in his pendant hands a 
monkey wrench and the coil of flexible 
tubing with which his master cunningly 
directs hot water into the hardened ar- 
teries of a suffering house. And on his 
pedestal I would carve the motto, — 
'Did You Ever Know a Plumber 
Who Had Grown Rich?' 



THE HOME OF THE PORCELAIN TUB 

1AM very glad,' wrote Lord Chester- 
field to young Mr. Stanhope, July 
30, 1749, 'that my letter, with Dr. 
Shaw's opinion, has lessened your bath- 
ing; for, since I was born, I never heard 
of bathing four hours a day.' 

Lord Chesterfield's surprise at the 
duration of his son's bath still leaves us 
wondering how that daily ablution was 
performed in 1749. Young Mr. Stan- 
hope lived a long, long time before our 
Bath-Room Era, when every well-to-do 
home has a bath-room, and the daily 
bath is as natural a topic of conver- 
sation in polite society as the daily 
weather. He might, twenty years la- 
ter, have gone to Dominicetti for the 
famous medicated bath which led Dr. 
Johnson to say to a gentleman who be- 
81 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

lieved in it, 'Well, sir, go to Domini- 
cetti, and get thyself fumigated, but be 
sure that the steam be directed at thy 
head for that is the peccant part.' Prob- 
ably he bathed at home: a tin tub was 
brought by a menial into his apartment, 
filled with hot and cold water, tested for 
temperature, and the young man left 
alone with it. But, although this was 
better than no bath at all, it had serious 
disadvantages. When the water cooled, 
Mr. Stanhope had perforce to summon 
the menial, and either retire to his 
closet or remain sitting in his tub while 
the bath was reheated. Convention- 
ally, I suppose, he was considered in- 
visible to the menial. If he splashed he 
splashed on the carpet; and when the 
tub was carried away, however care- 
fully, it left a damp spot. He had to 
hang his towel on one chair, and his 
clothes on another. His soap must have 
82 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

embarrassed him. According to all 
modern standards it was a makeshift 
kind of a bath. 

We have changed all that. In every 
house is a bath-room, so much like the 
bath-room in every other house that a 
stranger guest feels more immediately 
at home there than anywhere else. We 
bathe daily, and talk about it in public : 
or, to be exact, many bathe, and even 
more talk. We have become skilled — 
I am referring, of course, to that impor- 
tant section of society whose members, 
often otherwise useless, all together es- 
tablish the amenities of civilization — 
in leading conversation tactfully up to 
this topic. A few avoid it, but these are 
of a passing generation, and regard even 
the porcelain tub with disfavor. It is, 
so they say, dangerous: a treacherous, 
slippery contraption that you have to 
be careful getting in and out of. The 

83 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

mid-Victorian bath-room, with its 
painted tin tub built in by a carpenter, 
suits them better. If perchance their 
eyes fall on this essay, they will close 
the book hastily, perhaps destroy it, 
for in their time nice people did not talk, 
nor essayists write, about baths and 
bath-rooms: It was as much as ever if 
an author hinted, by some guarded, 
casual reference to soap when his hero 
came down to breakfast, that the dash- 
ing, well-groomed fellow had but just 
risen from a tub. Only heroes admit- 
tedly took morning baths. Occasion- 
ally a heroine may have — but wild 
horses couldn't have dragged the in- 
formation out of her; and the boldest 
novelist would have held back from 
admitting that he knew anything about 
it. Indeed, how could he? 

But a different point of view came in 
with the porcelain bath tub, which, as 
84 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

an advertisement so justly intimates, is 
less like a tub than like a great white 
china dish. One had to talk about it. 
It dignified the bath-room; it added 
beauty to bathing (which had hitherto 
depended entirely on the bather), and 
at the same time struck peremptorily 
that keynote of simplicity which has 
since remained the bath-room's distin- 
guishing characteristic. The white pu- 
rity of the tub forbids the introduction 
of any jarring note of unnecessary deco- 
ration : one cannot imagine a bath-room 
with pictures on the walls, a well-chosen 
bit of statuary in the window, and pho- 
tographs on the shelf under the neces- 
sary mirror — except sometimes the 
photograph of the gentleman who in- 
vented the talcum powder. Even the 
rug that lies in front of the tub is always 
inscribed BATH, yet here, if anywhere, 
the home of the porcelain tub might be 

85 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

given a touch of originality. Another 
motto might be substituted for BATH. 
— 'Welcome, Bather.' 'Dine and the 
world dines with you; bathe, and you 
bathe alone.' ' I am always drier on the 
other side,' etc. But the bath-room, 
after all, is nobody's single possession, 
and the motto that pleased one bather 
might seem a false note to another. 
Perhaps it is wiser to stick to BATH, 
and rest content with providing at 
their best those commonplaces which 
would have seemed such luxuries to 
Mr. Stanhope — the soap (imagine his 
delight) that floats, and the shower 
(imagine his astonishment) that sim- 
ulates the fall of rain from heaven. 
I am surprised, however, that no man- 
ufacturer of porcelain bath-tubs has 
yet thought to embellish his product 
with the legend in golden letters: 'One 
for All — and All for One.' 
86 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

I am speaking, you understand, of 
the bath-room ordinaire. There are, I 
believe, bath-rooms de luxe, in which 
the bather, soap and sponge in hand, 
gravely descends white marble steps 
into the bath. I have never done this 
myself; but I can see that gravely de- 
scending marble steps has more per- 
sonal dignity about it than the com- 
moner method of entering the bath by 
climbing over the side of the tub. It is 
like a low white wall: and only a little 
imagination is necessary to feel that 
there may be a sign somewhere, — 

No Bathing in This Tub. 

Police Take Notice. 
But the gain is temporary. Sooner or 
later, in either case, the bather must sit 
down — and where then is his personal 
dignity? I have read also of bath-tubs 
made of glass: but here the effort to 
attain distinction is too transparent. 

87 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

And then there is a patent combination 
kitchen-and-bath-room : quite rare: I 
hardly know how to describe it : perhaps 
an excerpt from the unpublished novel 
1 Mary Brogan ' : — 

'Mary felt tired, too tired to go out 
to the movies. The "words" that had 
passed between her and Mrs. Mont- 
gomery that morning, justified as Mary 
felt in her unwillingness to have another 
woman's child messing about in her 
kitchen — although smacking little Al- 
bert had perhaps been a too objective 
way of expressing this natural disincli- 
nation — had distressed a native refine- 
ment which it would have surprised 
haughty Mrs. Montgomery to be told 
was greater in her cook than in herself. 
Albert had been properly smacked, and 
there should have been an end of it. 
Nevertheless Mary Brogan felt tired. 
Was this all of life — smacking Albert 
88 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

and "rowing" with his mother? She 
finished washing and wiping the dishes 
slowly, put them away in the pantry, 
and sat down by the stove. It seemed 
as if there was really nothing left in 
the world that a girl could do to amuse 
herself. 

'All at once, as if the friendly stove 
had suggested it, Mary remembered 
that this was her night to take a bath. 

'Mary Brogan's kitchen was pro- 
vided with a remarkable invention to 
economize space and encourage a hy- 
gienic habit. Most of the time it was a 
sink for Mary to wash the dishes, Mon- 
day it was a couple of convenient laun- 
dry tubs for Mary to wash the clothes, 
and once a week it was a fine large por- 
celain bath-tub for Mary to wash her- 
self. Mary called it the "Three in 
Wan." She locked the doors and pulled 
down the window shades, so that she 

89 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

could neither be interrupted from within 
the house nor observed from without. 
And then, going to the sink, she turned 
the cosy kitchen into a laundry, and the 
laundry into a bath-room.' 

Such bath-rooms, fortunately, re- 
main exceptions to a desirable rule of 
uniformity. The bath-room de luxe is 
rare: it is possible that you, gentle 
reader, may gravely descend those mar- 
ble steps, but it is very unlikely. Mary 
Brogan's bath-room (which, by the 
way, revives the colonial custom of 
bathing in the wash-tub) is a tour de 
force of invention that is obviously in- 
convenient for general family use. The 
glass tub is more dangerous. It appeals 
to the fancy with its indirect suggestion 
of Cinderella's slipper. Here and there 
already a householder has installed one ; 
and the stranger guest feels stranger 
than ever when he takes a bath in it. 
90 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

One might get used to it, much as one 
would at first feel like a goldfish with- 
out room enough to swim; but there 
should be no rivalry between glass and 
porcelain. The tin tub passes: let the 
bath-tubs of the future be all of porce- 
lain or all of glass. 

Let us then tacitly agree to preserve 
the fine and simple integrity of the 
bath-room, with its slight, almost un- 
noticeable variations in wail-paper and 
the choice and arrangement of its nor- 
mal impedimenta. Surely we do not 
want the home of the porcelain tub to 
express any single, compelling, indi- 
vidual personality: to say, in effect, 'I 
am H. Titherington Lee's bath-room,' 
or 'Betty Martin's,' rather than, as 
now, 'I am the Bath-Room.' Let Mr. 
Lee, if he will, have his initials, H. T. L., 
in gold on his tooth-brush : but let him 
not have them lettered on the white 
9i 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

porcelain of the tub, or woven, instead 
of BATH, into the rug in front of it. 
Uniformity, indeed, might comfort- 
ably be carried a little further, so that 
all bath-rooms should be equally warm 
and sunny of a winter's morning. One 
might think, sometimes, that people 
who build houses had considered the 
bath-room after everything else. The 
plans seem complete, and yet there is a 
vague conviction that something im- 
portant has been left out. They go over 
them again and again, room by room: 
surely everything is as it should be — 
but the vague conviction still haunts 
them, and they have to put it out of 
their minds by force. The house is 
built: they move in, and somebody 
decides to take a bath. He starts for 
the bath-room. Presently his voice is 
heard, annoyed, astonished, and finally 
alarmed, anxiously shouting for the 
92 



THE PORCELAIN TUB 

rest of the family. Together they go 
over the house from top to bottom. 
There is no bath-room! Luckily, on 
the coldest side of the house and far 
away from the furnace, there is a small 
hall bedroom intended for an emer- 
gency. The emergency has arrived : the 
hall bedroom is called for. In the short- 
est possible time the nearest plumber 
and carpenter make it over into a home 
for the tub. 

But the ideal bath-room will have a 
southeasterly exposure, and the new- 
risen sun, that saw young Adam bath- 
ing in the Garden of Eden, will look 
cheerily in and add a sun bath. Place 
it not too near the guest chamber, for 
your guest is not sorry to be met on his 
way thither, clad in that gorgeous and 
becoming robe in which otherwise you 
will never see him. And do not clutter 
it, as some do, with extraneous objects. 

93 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

I remember a bath-room in which stood 
incongruously a child's rocking-horse. 
It gave the tub a kind of instability: 
and every time I looked at the rocking- 
horse, it seemed to rock. 



AT HOME IN THE GUEST CHAMBER 

ABOUT twenty-five years ago the 
late F. Marion Crawford came 
to lecture in a New England city: he 
was entertained in one of the most 
charming houses, given an afternoon re- 
ception, and led to the guest chamber, 
where he was left alone to rest until it 
should be time to appear at the lecture 
hall. It was an impressive guest cham- 
ber, furnished in rare colonial mahog- 
any; but the day after, the family 
looked at it and suddenly wondered, 
with misgivings, how Mr. Crawford had 
managed his resting. He was an un- 
usually tall, large man. Had he, they 
asked each other, rested on the digni- 
fied four-poster bed? — and if so, how 
considerately he had removed all traces 
of his little holiday! Or had he rested 
95 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

on either of the rare old colonial chairs 
— or both together, using one for his 
feet? They were a joy to look at, but 
hard, straight-backed, and unpromising 
resting places for a large literary man 
storing energy to deliver a lecture. Had 
he rested on the floor? It was a reful- 
gently polished floor, but Mr. Crawford 
might have softened it by putting two 
of the rugs together and rolling up a 
third for a pillow. If so, how courte- 
ously he had restored the rugs to their 
normal positions! The final conclusion 
was that he had rested sitting bolt up- 
right on one rare old colonial chair 
until he could bear it no longer, and 
then sitting bolt upright on the other. 
He never came back ; but it was deci- 
ded in the family that the next distin- 
guished person left alone to rest in the 
guest chamber should at least have a 
rocking-chair. 

96 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

At that period guests were not ex- 
pected to stay in a guest chamber longer 
than was necessary to sleep, wash their 
faces and hands, brush their hair, and 
change their clothes. It was, literally, 
a spare room. If you came to visit, you 
were supposed to come because you 
wished to be with the family as much 
as possible, and only the most needful 
provision was made for your separate 
existence. If you were a lady, you 
might retire for a while in the daytime, 
and lie down on the bed. But no gen- 
tleman had this privilege: only at bed- 
time could he go to bed, unless unexpect- 
edly taken so ill that he had to be put 
there, and the doctor sent for. The 
guest who left behind a suspicion of to- 
bacco smoke in the lace curtains left 
also the suspicion that this was no gen- 
tleman — still more, no lady! Stern 
neatness and tidy utilitarianism char- 

97 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

acterized the guest chamber : its double 
bed must be comfortable, its bureau 
commodious, its wash-stand provided 
with fresh towels and a new cake of 
pleasingly scented soap. As for pic- 
tures and bric-a-brac — it was a fine 
place to store a present without offend- 
ing the kind-hearted giver. 

But this period is passing away: a 
new thought has come in, that the guest 
should feel at home, day or night, in the 
guest chamber, and human ingenuity 
is making the place so comfortable that 
it may soon be difficult to tempt guests 
out of it except at meal-times. Already, 
in some cases, it has become necessary 
to serve breakfast in the guest chamber. 
It is a home within a home, an apart- 
ment (with breakfast) of one or more 
rooms and bath, in which the temporary 
tenant pays no rent, lunches and dines 
with the family, and is expected (follow- 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

ing the apartment hotel custom) to tip 
the house servants. There is, to use a 
shocking but expressive figure, one fly 
in his ointment — the extra and super- 
fluous twin bed. He cannot escape from 
it. In the daytime it is a constant re- 
minder that he is, after all, a stranger 
in a strange place; nor can he deceive 
himself with the idea that he keeps this 
extra cot for company. He is the com- 
pany. In the night, if he happens to 
awake and turn on that side, it sur- 
prises and startles him with its sugges- 
tion of a ward in a hospital. 

But do not try to eliminate the extra bed 
by rolling the twins together. Sleeping, 
you will forget. And when, instinctively, 
you seek the middle of your luxurious 
couch, the twins {unless you have thought 
to bind them leg to leg with a couple of 
neckties) will separate, and you will be 
rather emphatically reminded of what you 

99 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

have done, by falling out of bed between 
them. 

I remember a guest chamber of the 
earlier regime in which the literary inter- 
ests of the guest were catered to by an 
engraving of the desk at which Dickens 
wrote as it looked after Dickens was 
dead. Nowadays this is not sufficient. 
Books there must be, as well as a desk 
for the guest to write at while he is still 
alive, with plenty of stamps and sta- 
tionery, ink, pens, pencils, rubbers, cal- 
endar, blotters, a bottle of mucilage, 
sealing-wax, candle, seal, dictionary, 
Thesaurus, and Mr. Bartlett's Book of 
Quotations. Here, indeed, is a little 
library in itself; but the books unfor- 
tunately are not such as the average 
guest is likely to pick up, with an ex- 
clamation of delight, and take to the 
fireside. Nor, if we confess the truth, 
does the guest often take much pleasure 
ioo 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

in the classical literature which his host 
often provides for him: he prefers his 
own meditations to those of Marcus Au- 
relius. Many persons can not read class- 
ical literature; and there is no little 
truth in the conclusion of the poet (first 
published in 'The Mother's Assistant, 
The Young Lady's Friend, and Family 
Manual,' Boston, 1852), — 

When Caesar was a conqueror the Giraffe first 

was tamed, 
And for processions long and gay this creature 

then was famed; 
But no domestication kind could make him fit 

for use, 
And Nature's laws for us to thwart is manifest 

abuse. 

Sooner or later some enterprising 
publisher will bring out the Guest- 
Chamber Book-Shelf, or Twenty-five 
Best Books for the Best Bedroom. 
Such a list would, of course, begin with 
the Bible and Shakespeare, and could 
101 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

then conscientiously settle down to bus- 
iness with twenty-three places left. A 
book of home exercises, illustrated with 
photographs of the same persistent 
gentleman in forty or fifty more or less 
ridiculous and amusing positions, is al- 
ways interesting. A book of nature 
essays will hit some guests, and miss 
others. A book of poems to digest will 
sometimes entertain a guest. There 
should be several books of short stories 
by authors who appeal to different pub- 
lics. And (I should say) the book you 
are now reading. Humor and novels 
might wisely be omitted. In the one 
case the guest may yield to a natural 
temptation, and retell at dinner, in his 
own words, the humorous narrative he 
has just been reading; and in the other 
there is a possibility that the visit will 
end before the novel. It becomes more 
difficult than ever to get the guest out 
102 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

of the guest chamber. As for maga- 
zines, they are desirable — but not too 
many of them, or the first glimpse of 
your guest chamber may unhappily re- 
mind the newcomer of the waiting 
room at his doctor's or dentist's. 

'My chamber,' wrote Washington 
Irving, describing in the 'Sketch Book' a 
contemporary English home, 'was in an 
old part of the house, the ponderous 
furniture of which might have been fab- 
ricated in the days of the giants. The 
room was panelled, with cornices of 
heavily carved work, in which flowers 
and grotesque faces were strangely in- 
termingled, and a row of black-looking 
portraits stared mournfully at me from 
the walls. The bed was of rich, though 
faded damask, with a lofty tester, and 
stood in a niche opposite the bow-win- 
dow. . . . The moonbeams fell 
through the upper part of the casement, 
103 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

partially lighting up the antiquated 
apartment.' 

It is an odd thing about the guest 
chamber of the past, as we enter it 
by the door of literature, that it was so 
often gloomy: it is almost as if there 
has been a historic sequence of guest 
chambers: (i) those in which the guest 
was afraid to sleep; (2) those in which 
he was willing to sleep; (3) those in 
which he was delighted to sleep. If 
there was a ghost on the premises, it 
was always likely to butt in (as we say 
nowadays) in the guest chamber. If 
there had been a particularly undesir- 
able ancestor in the family, they always 
hung his portrait (probably to get rid 
of it) over the guest-chamber fireplace, 
where the moon could light it, and his 
sinister eye, too natural to be painted, 
could watch the guest trying to count 
himself to sleep. The guest-chamber 
104 



RD 15 6 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

chimney was peculiarly constructed: 
always the wind, carefully imitating its 
idea of a lost soul, sighed and wailed 
and shrieked in it. The floor was laid 
with a board that creaked aloud if but a 
mouse stepped on it; and the ivy was 
trained to tap-tap-tap like a finger 
on the window-pane. Often the guest 
chamber was the ghost chamber: and I, 
for one, am glad that it is not so any 
longer. For in proportion as the guest 
feels at home in the guest chamber, the 
ghost doesn't. And the complete at- 
homeyness — except for that one fly in 
the ointment, the extra twin bed — of 
our modern guest chamber makes the 
guest ghost-proof. He goes to bed and 
sleeps without a thought of ghosts, just 
as an English lady visiting an American 
family put her shoes outside the guest- 
chamber door, slept, and took them in 
again, with never a thought of her kind 

105 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

host polishing them in the cellar. He is 
haunted only by the thought that every 
minute brings him nearer the end of his 
visit. 

For go he must! The hour was set, 
the train selected, even before his ar- 
rival; and, to make assurance doubly 
sure, another guest was probably in- 
vited. Truly I spoke without thinking 
when I said there was but one fly in his 
ointment: this Inexorable Fact is an- 
other and bigger one. Formerly the 
length of the visit took care of itself. 
The guest, always with the family ex- 
cept when asleep or dressing, reached 
the human limit of visiting at about the 
same time that the family reached the 
human limit of having him visit. Now 
and then an exception caused pain and 
embarrassment; but ordinarily they all 
reached their human limits with reason- 
able unanimity. A day came when the 
1 06 



THE GUEST CHAMBER 

guest said he 'must go' to-morrow: the 
family said 'must he go' to-morrow — 
and to-morrow he went. 

It is not so nowadays. The guest 
being settled in the guest chamber, — 
with its private bath and probably, 
sooner or later, its kitchenette, — he 
and the family are merely pleasantly 
conscious of each other: he might stay 
on and on, in a kind of informal and 
happy adoption, until death or matri- 
mony intervened and took him away. 
But the family, unless they kept on add- 
ing to the house, would have no guest 
chamber: and other things being equal, 
constant building is an annoyance. And 
so, wisely, the host or hostess specifies 
in advance the length of the visit; and 
the extra little twin bed is a useful sym- 
bol and reminder of its impermanency. 



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